I have been strangely absent from my blog for the past weeks. The new year came and moved in while I was still getting settled. So many things have been coming to us and we race to keep up. Milt’s film, Video Letters from Prison is getting a lot of movement now. The post production is done and it goes into the public broadcast system in June. In the meantime, we are discovering that this powerful documentary is indeed a way for us to finally talk about the heart and soul of the family. Today we met with a federal judge, a bunch of legal systems people and a juvenile judge. By the time they watched the film the women were all in tears. They really understood that without this core strength of the parents and the lineage, a child is much like a wingless bird. He cannot fly.
After the meeting, I went into a tailspin. Something about that meeting brought up all the memories of all the many ways I have tried to become an advocate for the young people. I was having flashbacks of my early years as a resource teacher in an elementary classroom for emotionally disturbed children. And the time I worked in a teen attention center. And the talk I gave last spring to 90 incarcerated youth. And the book I wrote about adolescence and my own children’s teen years. There is probably no stronger desire in me than to be able to somehow turn around this destructive cycle of children left to raise and fend for themselves somehow. When I wrote Albert’s Manuscript, (somewhere here in the mix and also at smashwords.com) I felt like the great spirit was talking to me and urging me forward. Albert learned that when children are treated well, they become weavers on the loom of the new world.
It would be sweet if the many lines of my life converged at last I could take a place of strength and voice and confidence in helping these lost ones. I believe it is what I came here to do and perhaps I have been too self-absorbed to get on it. When we showed Video Letters to a group of high school students in Lincoln, NE in late October of last year, a young man practically cornered me and wanted to talk about his own father. His sadness was like a scent that lingered around his young body. It hurts me to know how many just like him are out there trying to figure out this freaking world alone.
Milt recently read that swearing can bring down your blood pressure. I’m practicing that but won’t subject anybody to my experiment here.
So, in the coming weeks I will be exploring ways to create a toolkit that could be used by families, children, careworkers. We shall see what evolves. I am exciting about taking the concepts of Family Constellation Work and making them much more widely known. A child stands in the lineage of two parents. In order for a child to stand strong, both lines must remain open. There, that is the simplest explanation I can give.
In the meantime, my straw bale house stands alone in the freezing snow without us. We left right before Christmas and are back in Rapid City, SD for the next few months working our tails off to see this film get properly launched. Milt just created a Face Book fan page for the film so do check it out and become a fan. (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Video-Letters-From-Prison/227630477599?ref=ts
Blessing to all in this advancing new year.
Jamie
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